When I was in high school, being one of the few Asian girls, I was feverishly pursued by many white boys. Even though secretly I was very much attracted to them, I was scared to death at the same time and I never had the courage to accept their advances. I rebuffed them, acted as if I was offended, but in reality I very much craved and enjoyed their attention.
I remember going home once and I heard a guy saying, “When I grow up, I’m going to China. Because there are so many Chinese women in China and they all love white American guys.” The other white boys chimed in and said the same, how so many Chinese women will marry white American men for green cards, how “We are all going to China to bring hot Chinese wives to America to bang them like sluts.”
Their conversation made me feel very embarrassed, and yet simultaneously it rekindled a question to me that I was never able to answer, a question that all Asians sort of knew in their heart of hearts but sometimes were just … kind of … embarrassed to admit. Whence this attraction between white guys and Asian girls? I know as an Asian girl that I’m simply irresistible to many white guys. And of course, some people would say that those white guys have yellow fever, Asian fetish, etc. On the other hand, there are many, many Asian women who absolutely love and worship white men so much so that it has become an open secret and so much so that it has become a fact so well known that people would rather shamefully conceal it. …
I remember once overhearing a conversation my mom was having with a girlfriend of hers, a divorced single mother from Shanghai who lived in New York. She bragged about the beautiful landscape on Long Island, the quiet neighborhood, and most specially, the beautiful people. “They are all white! So beautiful. I want to go live there. I want to buy a house there.”
When I was in college I shared a suite with three other Asian girls and one white girl. The white girl was the only one who had a boyfriend, a tall white boy with a full beard. One night, when the white girl was out of town, the white guy put his moves on one of my Asian roommates. My Asian roommate wasn’t considered beautiful by Asian standard. Her skin was dark, her eyes were small, and she was short and her legs bowed like a typical Japanese. But something about her attracted the white guy, what, to be honest, I wasn’t sure. The white boy was tall, over six feet, over a foot taller than all the Asian girls in the suite, and also much taller than any of the Asian boys. His brown beard made him look ruggedly handsome. His girlfriend, the white girl, was tall also, around 5 feet 8 at least. They towered over the rest of us like two aliens with long slender limbs and giant torsos.
Long story short, that night he caroused his way into our room and started to cajole and tease my roommate, a shy and reserved Asian girl who had never been with a boy before. With honeyed words, trinkets and gawds, trifles, nosegays and sweetmeats, messengers of strong prevailment in unhardened youth, he filched her heart and seduced her to bed with him. He said he has always been secretly attracted to Asian girls. Something about her made him tingle whenever he saw her. My roommate later said that she has experienced a joy that she had never experienced in her entire life up to that point. “It was love,” she said. They went to bed together and I heard her moans. Like all the rest of us, she was a virgin at the time. But unlike the rest of us, she was made a woman that night.
It was my first time to know a girlfriend of mine having actual sexual experience other than merely fantasized.
Ever since she became a changed person. She started wearing high heels; she pierced her ears and wore earings; she put on perfume and painted her face with makeup. Soon, words started to spread. The boyfriend of the gorgeous white girl deflowered an Asian virgin, in the suite 203.
I suppose we all knew her love was doomed. There was no way that he would leave his drop-dead gorgeous, blond-haired, blue-eyed girlfriend, to be with her, a lowly, nerdy Asian girl. Even so, she still felt happy during that period of time. She felt loved, and she loved, even if that love was doomed to be sad. She did everything he demanded of her, and she even asked one of my other Asian roommates to join her in a threesome, just for him. Both of them were virgins before he deflowered them. “Two Asian virgins deflowered by a white guy who already has a girlfriend, a white girl”, so the rumor spread.
Ever since, I have been obsessed. I always wondered, how come Asian girls are so easy when it comes to white men? Why are those Asian girls, supposedly chaste, seemingly virtuous, studious, obedient to their parents, reserved and observant of their traditional Asian culture, become so cheap, so slutty, so whorish, so easy prey to the charms of handsome, tall, gentle white men?
That was my freshman year in college. By my sophomore year, my other roommate, the only other remaining Asian girl from suite 203, also had a boyfriend, an international student from Portugal. He was far from good looking. He was short; his teeth was crooked; he had black hair, and his skin wasn’t even very light. He had those swarthy Mediterranean features, as one of my white girlfriends explained to me. I accidentally bumped into them on the bus and she introduced him as her boyfriend, which surprised me since she had never told me about it. She seemed embarrassed. I don’t know. Maybe it was I who felt embarrassed. She didn’t talk much. After the first semester she moved off campus with her boyfriend and I rarely saw her again.
At some point I started to connect the dots. I was reminded of my aunt Julie, who at the time—before I entered college—was in her late twenties and was gorgeous. When I applied for colleges, she accompanied me to my interview for MIT. While I was being interviewed, in a coffee shop, sitting across a narrow aisle, my aunt was being “hit on” (I suppose that’s the correct nomenclature to describe what I saw) by a white guy. After the interview, I walked over to tell her that we can go and I saw them exchanging numbers. She told me the guy was a lawyer and went to Brown University and he asked about why she was sitting there alone by herself. She told him about my interview for MIT. My aunt came from a very prestigious family in China. Her father worked in the politico bureau of the Chinese Communist Party and her mom was the Vice Chair of the Beijing Board of Education. She herself got her MBA from Purdue University and worked as an operations manager for NYU. Being not only gorgeous and absolutely beautiful, but also wealthy and well-educated, of course she had many suitors …
Jump now to two years after that uneventful event. My aunt was moving out of her old apartment and we were helping her. And I saw that white guy again. I just realized that he wasn’t very tall, only around 5 feet 7, which is very short for a white guy. Most of the white guys I saw on campus were well over 6 feet. He was rather good looking, but given how most white guys are very good looking for us Asian girls, he probably didn’t really stand out among white guys. My aunt saw me staring at him and told me that “you can talk to him.” I honestly don’t know what she meant by this at the time, but it was what she said, and so I started talking to the white guy, hesitantly. The white guy didn’t seem to want to talk much either anyway. When my aunt was off to carry some more boxes and was out of sight, the white guy led me to a corner of the bedroom and showed me a box and in this box was a large, brown spider covered with hair. He was very excited to see how scared I was, and, leaning close to me, with an evil smile on his face, he whispered in my ear: ”At night, when we have sex, I would tie Julie to the bed, and put this on her body. Then she does anything I ask of her.” I was shocked, but trying to be polite, I smiled awkwardly. When Julie walked in, I smiled at her with that kind of smile that showed that I sort of knew what was not supposed to know. She glared at the white guy and didn’t say anything.
From what I could surmise, I guess my aunt Julie was also engaged in some sort of SM relationship with her former white boyfriend, just like in the novel Shanghai Baby. Art imitate life or life imitate art? I don’t know, but it seems that many Asian women engaged in relationships with white men are also engaged in SM relationships. And just like in the novel, Julie has had a long time Chinese boyfriend who was still living in China. A few years later, she married that Chinese guy. Like most Chinese men, he is very much hen-pecked and “pussy-whipped”, if I’m using the expression correctly. And no, he never knew about Julie’s past relationship nor about her submissive role in the bedroom with her former white boyfriend. Julie had warned my mom to never let me bring up about that white boyfriend in front of her Chinese husband.
